Joe the Author - Christians Who Sell Jesus

Selling Jesus

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This is the first episode in a series of conversations we're going to have about different kinds of Christians who sell Jesus.

00:07

So, we're going to be discussing different profiles of people who sell Jesus in different ways.

00:12

These profiles are already available to read over at sellingjesus.org if you click on learn and then you click on Christians who sell Jesus.

00:21

The intention is to paint real-world scenarios of people who actively are engaging in the Jesus trade, give an evaluation, and then we'll have a roundtable discussion of practical applications.

00:35

So, here is our first person, Joe the author.

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Joe is a gifted author who writes books to help churches be healthier.

00:44

He has valuable biblical teaching to share, and he genuinely wants to serve the body of Christ.

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Since he has friends in high places, he's been able to get his books published by a large and influential Christian publishing house.

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He's happy that the publisher only charges $14.99 for each of his paperbacks and $9.99 for the ebook versions.

01:05

They pay him a dollar royalty for each sale.

01:09

When people ask him about how much he makes from his books, he's always quick to say that he's not in it for the money, and the small kickback he gets doesn't even cover the amount of time each book takes him to write.

01:19

The fact that he's losing money in the sense that his profits don't equal the value of his time makes him feel good that he's making a sacrifice for the kingdom of God.

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Although Joe is well-meaning and sincere, and willing to sacrifice time and money to build up God's church, he has been deceived in several ways.

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First, he wrongly assumes that scripture allows the sale of ministry.

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What he's doing is clearly Christian ministry, and both Jesus and Paul make it crystal clear through their lived example and teaching that ministry should never be sold, but it should definitely be supported by the free generosity of God's people.

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Second, Joe wrongly believes that the only way Christian writers can care for their families and stay out of poverty is by putting price tags on their books.

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The Bible and church history are full of examples of servants of God who were provided for through the free giving of his people to do ministry, or who worked a secular job like making tents in order to pay the bills.

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Third, Joe has been deceived by promises of renown and acclaim if he publishes with a big-name publisher.

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Although he knows that he could distribute his book for free online digitally, and self-publish a paper version without receiving any profit, the lure of being perceived as a legitimate or real author because of the imprint of a well-known publisher prevailed.

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However, he covers up this desire for prestige by telling himself that a big publisher will reach more people.

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This may or may not be so, since he has never tried the alternative, but it doesn't matter.

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God does not measure success in numbers of copies distributed, but rather in obedience, and obedience would mean giving his writing away and supporting his ability to write by some other means than selling it.

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Joe is unintentionally living the lie that reaching more people with his writing is more important than obeying God.

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For him, the ends justify the means.

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So he's already observed that he's not making a lot.

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And that's one of the bizarre things about this commercialized Christianity, this world that we live in, is that people are willing to trade Jesus for money for so little.

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Proverbs 28 21 says that for a piece of bread a man will do wrong.

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The payback is so little it would be so easy just to forgo that small amount.

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But let's say it is actually something that he relies on.

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He could call on the support of others.

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It could be his church that helps him out.

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It could be other churches that help him out.

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It could be various supporters from online.

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There's a lot of tools that exist like Patreon.

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So there's a lot of options.

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Right and I just want to reiterate there are so many people who are not making enough money to live on from writing books and that is the standard across the board and the entire industry of being an author.

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Everybody tells you you should never be an author to make money to actually live on right? The standard expectation of an author should be to receive just enough to kind of have a tiny bonus you know of some extra spending money but never to actually have it as a full career that they could dedicate all their time to.

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That's a luxury very very few authors ever achieve.

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So I think a lot of other authors even though they know that is the real expectation if they're going to be realistic they settle for that for the prestige.

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So I think a lot of a lot of the time these authors are they're more happy with the pride of having a big publisher name on their book even more than getting money for it.

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Same with journal articles and stuff like that you know.

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It's just the prestige.

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Journals often or usually don't pay you and sometimes you have to pay the journal to publish your stuff and it's just the prestige right? Getting that ego boost that I'm published by this well-known entity and I think that's even more sad when you're not only giving up the right to to be able to live on you know as the scripture says that the the worker deserves his wages.

06:22

You're giving that up and then you're selling Jesus just for the sake of your pride right? You're turning over the work that you've you've done for Christ to be controlled and sold by an entity just so that you can have that entity stamped on your book or whatever and that's that's pretty tragic.

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And I think another fear that people will have is that no one's gonna read their book or their work and that's also a reason why they go with a publisher.

06:48

What would you say to that as an author yourself? Yeah well once again I fear is a horrible master horrible way to live by as you're you're driving reason for things and so yeah I mean if if you trust God so little that you don't believe that people will be blessed by your book if you don't follow the the status quo then that that's a little sad but I understand that that's a real thing so I would say the cost of obedience sometimes is is gonna be obscurity maybe for a while maybe forever and that's okay.

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I mean there's so many people in Christian history right? I was just reading about a guy the other day dedicated 29 years to textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible that nobody knows who he is his Wikipedia page is very very short and just Christian history is full of those kinds of people right? The faithfulness faithfulness is not guaranteed to get you a big name.

07:48

And it's it's a very strange motivation to have because you know basically what you're saying is that I want people to read my book and that will make me feel good to know that people are reading it but what you know you don't want people to read your book just for the sake of reading it you want them to be blessed by it and so if someone's gonna be blessed by your book or blessed by whatever topic it is then if it's good it's it's probably gonna get shared around whereas you know if it's not that great or if if it's just not relevant why do you want someone to read it like they could be reading something else that could be more useful for their spiritual life.

08:24

Exactly and it may not God may not have it have planned to bless people with it in your lifetime right? Isn't that the case with so many authors that we see who basically died in relative obscurity and then now they're they're massive hits it really is just a matter of walking by faith and submitting all of your your things to the Lord and you're you're just called to be obedient do your work and he can control how it goes viral or not and all of that stuff it's way out of our hands at the end of the day we can do all kinds of social media engineering optimization of all these sorts of things even pay thousands and thousands of dollars to hype it and get it out there and at the end of the day there may be some obscure horrible book that outsells it I think that a lot of what you're saying really does rest on being convinced that this is obedience you know what we're describing is giving freely because we have been given freely a lot of people I think come to this hear these things and they were already sort of leaning toward the direction of this would be better but they're not necessarily at a position to say this is right and the other position is wrong and so if you're really only thinking of it at that level you're not going to be too persuaded by the idea that you know trust the Lord he will ensure that this works out for the best because you're still thinking about it pragmatically really what's needed is not a pragmatic evaluation that says yeah giving is probably better in most cases or it's slightly more faithful or something like that but it really is what is required and we can trust the Lord to we can trust the Lord to do good yeah another proverb Proverbs 1124 says one gives freely yet gains even more another withholds what is right only to become poor yeah and I think it's important to highlight that we were arguing first like from Scripture for this and then after that I would say we can talk all day about pragmatic practical even economic arguments of why this is wise and good and then third we can talk about emotional arguments those all those arguments are in place and we can talk about them but what we're trying to do is be careful to highlight first and foremost the scriptural basis for everything that we're asserting here or arguing for here because at the end of the day that's what should be the last word right so if we were to go to the second tier of that into the practical arguments then yeah I think the fear of not getting your book out is many times a misplaced fear because giving it away for free is many many times more powerful especially if it is a good book is many times more powerful than the alternative for going to many people and getting to many people's hands and you can read books on that I'm reading a couple books right now one is called free the future of a radical price these are secular books that are arguing for giving things away from just a worldview that's non-christian but the pragmatics they have seen work especially in a digital age work many times much more effectively than the standard model that we see yeah it's so bizarre that occasionally people come back and say we're in a different era now implying that for some reason it's okay to sell things now but it wasn't back then but it's complete opposite it's it's never never been easier to give for free than in all history that it is today yeah so back to Joe I would just end on a very practical note you know if you were asking me okay so what do I do what do I put as the on the copyright page of my book first of all let's start with that you know so I want to give this away what do I put there all I've ever seen is all rights reserved standard stuff so you know what do I do well you can look at what we've done with the site what we've done with the book the Dorian principle and some of your books Andrew that you've gone back and updated that covers on which is to include a creative commons zero notice on there which is dedication to the public domain so that people can know that the author has handed this over to the public domain it can be used freely by anyone right and I'll just give an example this is a real testimony from a guy I've been talking to recently and so there's no real hard and fast rules about this exactly this guy he chose to put creative commons zero 2023 and by you know his name and then he said this work is freely given all of this publication may be shared translated sold and copied freely without limitation and without permission to learn more about this open license click on the linked badge below or visit copy church free the badge that he put there is this freely given badge that says public domain under it which is provided on copy church by John which is a really nice little kind of logo thing that you can put in your publications to make it clear and also to link back to a page that will explain in more detail to people who have a doubt about the license you know maybe this wasn't meant to be a huge conversation about licensing but it is an issue with authors right we have to talk about this and maybe maybe John you could jump in here you probably have a lot to say about this to add yeah sure so the thing to realize about copyright and what you're doing with your work is that copyright is automatic so you you own your work and the exact text you put on that it isn't about what legal trouble you'll get into it's about freeing it up for other people so they don't have to worry about legal issues so you don't have to worry about making a mistake on your work because it's not going to affect you but it does affect other people and so the key thing you want to do is make sure that it's clear what license applies to it and so that's why it's really important to either put the URL to copy.church or to the Creative Commons public domain dedication or at the very least if it's for example an image that you're sharing around putting that Creative Commons to CC0 which is a trademark and so people if there's ever a legal issue people will know that refers to that particular license so it's all about making sure other people feel confident to be able to share it and they're not going to get in trouble so you don't have to hire a lawyer it's really simple to do you can just follow the instructions on the side.

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Let me ask you this John why would it not be sufficient just to say this is in the public domain and leave it at that? Yeah so it's not sufficient because every single country has different laws to do with copyright there is an international agreement but even that is subject to the laws of individual countries and so because the legal landscape is so complex thankfully a secular organization called Creative Commons put a lot of hard work into creating this public domain dedication that covers all of the edge cases covers all of the basis so that everyone in almost every country with 99.9% certainty can feel confident and freely sharing something and that they're not going to get in trouble for it so that's why it's important not to do it yourself because people have already put in a lot of hard work analyzing all the laws in all the countries to come up with something that works everywhere.

16:16

Yeah and another point of confusion that people like Joe the author might have is where do I sign up for this license? How do I get it? Do I need to pay for it to get a Creative Commons license? Do I have to go register it somewhere? This is a question I get constantly from people because there's really a lot of confusion about that they're like oh do I need to go and create an account with them or something and the answer is no you don't have to do any of that it's just you write Creative Commons zero on your book and then you're done you don't have to register or fill out forms or anything it's pretty simple couldn't be easier and the other thing I'll just throw out there to you guys if I were Joe the author I would probably ask so why is it important for me to put a license at all why can't I just not put copyright why not I'll just leave that page totally blank is that okay? Yeah no because copyrights automatic so right and this is the thing that we really need to because of the culture the societies we live in we really need to have a Christian culture of sticking a public domain little just copy and paste to go little public domain dedication on every single thing you make because it's automatically copyrighted and so if you make a little Bible study just a short page for your youth group or your small group then that's automatically copyrighted and so you've got to get into the habit of just sticking that little thing on every single thing you make so that the people in your group can then copy that study and share it with others and not have to keep going back and finding the original author to ask permission.

17:59

Right and I would also tell Joe like it's really important to be clear because if you leave ambiguity around what you're sharing then people will because because there has been so much threatening and posturing and fear-mongering around everything to do with this whole world of copyright and rights and people are by default just afraid that like they're like oh it's not clear there might be some loophole here I won't touch it then but if you are really really clear and articulate about what how you're giving it away that helps everybody that's going to be what really helps launch it out into the world and and get it into more people's hands.

18:45

Yeah we we come across these issues all the time as we try to gain ministry resources I remember a Bible translation that thought it was a good idea to put a clause that people can freely share the Bible translations scripture as long as they hold a certain theological view about the inspiration of scripture which sounds might sound great initially but then when you think about it that that basically means that non-christians can't share scripture with their friends and say hey look at this this is a cool story about this is a cool parable from Jesus can't do it because you don't hold the belief about the inspiration of scripture so please don't put any legal clauses or conditions when you're sharing you can suggest what you'd like people to do but please don't make any other requirements because it causes big legal headaches.